


for the girls fairytales abandoned

by andibeth82



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, F/M, Identity Issues, Natasha Feels, Natasha-centric, Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-30
Updated: 2015-01-30
Packaged: 2018-03-09 15:51:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3255626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They told stories about the Black Widow, the girl sometimes known as Natalia Alianovna, the girl otherwise known as Natasha Romanov: she was left for dead, she was a ballerina, she saved the world. </p><p>Only one of those is true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for the girls fairytales abandoned

**Author's Note:**

> I suppose this could loosely be interpreted as an AU - it's mostly based on comic backstory, but I've played around with canon liberally, so it's probably not the backstory you'd expect if you're super familiar with the comics. All liberties taken remain my own.
> 
> As with most things in my life, most of this was written shortly around the time of Winter Soldier, and then abandoned for more shiny things like big bangs and exchanges. Thanks to an impetus from this week's Agent Carter, I was finally inclined to finish it and throw it into the world.
> 
> Thanks to **bobsessive** for beta and read-through. Title from [this post](http://isjustprogress.tumblr.com/post/108923474417/lexalarke-for-the-girls-the-fairytales).

They told stories about the Black Widow, the girl sometimes known as Natalia Alianovna, the girl otherwise known as Natasha Romanov: she was left for dead, she was a ballerina, she saved the world.

Only one of those is true.

 

**I. Natalia**

It starts in Stalingrad, the first time she escapes. She waits until the room is black and the air is still and then creeps from her bed with a knife in one hand and a shawl in the other, slipping through the shards of the broken window. She squeezes her small-boned body through the slats and soundlessly pounds the pavement in pursuit of escape, of freedom, of a world she doesn’t recognize but thinks she remembers.

It’s futile to run, that much she knows. (And she’s only twelve, and she doesn’t know much, but that’s something she _knows_.) She runs anyway, ducking in and out of shadows and dodging outstretched arms for at least three blocks until she’s pulled backwards by the hair, one hand tight over her mouth, her screams silenced before they can even begin.

“No one runs from us,” says the man with the mask, a man she only knows as a machine.

The asset, they call him. The salvation, they call him. That’s what he is to Ivan and her handlers and to the people who strap her legs and arms to the chair every night. To her, and to everyone else, he is a hologram. He is legend, a story that you tell through barely-moving lips in hushed voices and only when it’s no longer dark outside, so the monsters behind the tales can’t lurk in the shadows.

He’s a myth, except this time, he’s real. His metal arm a vice against her body and his breath is hot against her skin and even still, he is a ghost, a name she has only heard whispered around the Red Room that belongs to a face she’s only seen in her dreams.

“No one leaves. Not even you, Natalia.”

They push a needle into her arm and drag her prone form back to the barracks they’ve set up as base, and her punishment that night is no less than she knows she deserves -- backhands across the face and slashes across the softer parts of her flesh, a boot in her ribs, the cracking of bones echoing loud in her ears, colorful displays of black and green and red along her spine, adding to the ones already fading. There is light and there is a bit in her mouth, there is pain and there is metal on both sides of her head, and then, thankfully, there is nothing.

She’ll lie alone with her face pressed into the floor, her cheeks wet with the sticky texture of her own blood, until she can gather enough strength to crawl to the corner and clean herself up, blotting damp rags against red, red skin.

The scars on her body, those will heal.

The scars on her soul, well – those are a different story.

 

**II. Aleksandra**

She is Aleksandra Petrova and she learned to fight in the Red Room. She was trained by men who didn’t have names, who beat her down, who then expected her to fight with broken arms and broken legs. And if she couldn’t do it, she was locked in a cell for forty-eight hours with no food and no water, forced to fight for her life the same way she was trained to fight for her country.

She is Aleksandra Petrova and she can rewire a bomb in less than fifteen seconds, shoot firearms like a well-trained sniper, and kill ten men without breaking a sweat.

She is Aleksandra Petrova, and something is broken inside her brain.

 

***

 

She is thirteen when she meets the Winter Soldier for what she considers the first time, she is thirteen with blonde hair and he is ageless with the same metal arm that she remembers from when she tried to run.

It’s her first official solo mission out of the Red Room and she’s been dispatched to a part of the country that she’s told she should recognize (except, no, she was never Natalia, was never “daddy’s little princess”) to kill a family who has been disloyal to her captors and to her country. The Winter Soldier is told to follow, to make sure their newest recruit doesn’t fall back into a remorseful state, to finish the job if it turns out she cannot do it on her own.

A failsafe, in case the girl who is supposed to be the best cannot prove it.

She waits until the family is asleep and then shoots the mother, stabs the father, ignores the cries of the small child in the next room as she puts a bullet in her, too. She cleans the blood off her hands as if she’s washing soap from dirty skin and when she’s finished, he’s standing outside the house, blocking her path.

He meets her halfway and grabs her hands, pushing them down by her sides, forcefully spins her around until she’s face-to-face with a young boy, the child she hadn’t noticed following her out of the house in the wake of his family’s death, and _it’s an honest mistake,_ she tries to explain in broken Russian, even though she knows you cannot make mistakes and because she knows what he’s supposed to do and what his presence means.

She knows that he’s supposed to kill her.

“You’re scared,” he says as he holds her at the same length that he raises his gun, and she looks him in the eye defiantly, and she purses her lips.

I am not scared, she wants to say, because I am different. I am not scared, she wants to say, because I cannot remember who I was before. I am not scared, she wants to say, because I know any salvation you can offer me is better than this life. I am not scared, I am not, I am, I am –

He puts two slugs into the ground without speaking and then lets go of her arm, pointing somewhere into the distance.

She runs away and doesn’t look back.

 

**III. Olga**

She is Olga Bogrov, and she was born in Volograd, and a man named Ivan Petrovich trained her. She was his best student, the golden child in a world where every girl was supposed to deliver, and she learned to fight using other girls as punching bags, learned early on the sound of breaking bones and the ways that bruises can easily decorate an otherwise bland canvas of skin.

She is Olga Bogrov, and she can adapt to any kind of mission in any kind of country, she can speak sixteen languages and she can bed any type of target.

She is Olga Bogrov, and something is broken inside her brain.

 

***

 

She is a day after twenty-one when she meets the Winter Soldier for the second time, she is a day after twenty-one with red in her hair and red on her ledger, and he is still a ghost in a world where he spends much of his time trying to erase the past. He finds her in a bolthole in Eastern Europe, and she does not plead or beg or do any of the things that she would have done before.

(She is Olga here, but she thinks she might have been Natalia somewhere else.)

“Do you remember when you were supposed to kill me?” she asks as she wipes her knife on her shirt, the blade sharp between her fingers, seemingly unfazed by his appearance even as she strips herself of soiled clothing until she is cold, until she is naked, until she is bare.

“Yes,” is all he says when he steps out of the shadows, moving through the lightless room. She stands up and holds out her knife with hard eyes, a mask she knows he can’t read and a smile framed by teeth that could tear away skin.

“You were scared then,” he continues, his eyes moving over her body and taking her in, the way she stands rigid and tall against his towering height. “You are not scared now.”

I am not scared, she wants to say, because I am different. I am not scared, she wants to say, because I cannot remember who I was before. I am not scared, she wants to say, because you are offering me warmth that reeks of rebellion and danger and unmaking. I am not scared, I am not, I am, I am –

She sinks wolves’ teeth into his shoulder and he draws blood against her old scars, a steel weapon of manmade anger juxtaposed against a figurine of glass who has been broken and glued back together so many times that some of the jagged pieces don’t fit together properly anymore.

“You danced,” says the Winter Soldier when he is staring at her feet, which are bruised and cracked and splintered. The girl known as Natalia (Aleksandra, Olga) shakes her head.

“I’m not sure,” she admits, sitting up in bed. “It’s all a memory, now. A bad one.”

They get dressed together in the dark, in the silence, his metal arm catching fire in the parts of the room where the shadows can’t reach, like the breath she feels stilling in her lungs.

“Do not come find me,” he says before he leaves and she smiles thinly, and there is honesty there, something raw and vulnerable and dangerous.

“I can’t. They say you’re a ghost.”

 

In the Red Room, they gave her dreams of bloody toes and cracked limbs.

At S.H.I.E.L.D., they gave her dreams of bloody faces and cracked bones.

It’s not that different, really, in the end.

 

**IV. Natasha**

She is twenty-five when she meets the Winter Soldier for the third time, she is twenty-five and trying to scrub the red into pink with a man who, for reasons she still doesn’t understand, has taken her under his wing.

She is twenty-five and he has fired the shot that has left her tires ripped, her team dead, and half of her own blood on the side of the road.

“You are a dumb little girl,” he tells her, her voice low, before he puts a bullet between the eyes of the engineer, the man she knows never had a chance.

“I have learned,” she says in return, and there is a pain that feels real and not real at the same time, a struggle to speak against a darkness that is threatening to overwhelm her. “And I am not so little anymore.”

I am not scared, she wants to say, because I am different. I am not scared, she wants to say, because I cannot remember who I was before. I am not scared, she wants to say, because the man who ran off to find me help has told me he will return, and for the first time in my life, I believe that. I am not scared, I am not, I am, I am –

He pulls her broken body into a shallow ravine, behind the sightlines of prying eyes, away from the fireball of the truck and the gunfire that still rains heavy on their backs.

“I cannot save you,” he tells her and she shakes her head.

“He’ll save me,” she says weakly, and she’ll remember the moment as the first time she comes to terms with the fact that out of all the places and all the missions and all the close calls, it’s here that she might die, bleeding out on the side of a road in Odessa, and then if she were gone by default maybe he would be gone, too, both of them erased from their own stories as if they were nothing more than mindless ideas, torn out pages of a history book that had no right to exist in the first place.

“He wanted to kill you,” says the Winter Soldier, and she doesn’t bother to wonder why or how he knows, or how he knew to show up in the first place, and why her and why him and why is he not killing her now, why he didn’t kill her when he first had the chance in the first place, and why does no one kill her at the points when she truly, desperately just _wants to die_.

“Yes,” she agrees weakly and the Winter Soldier looks confused, then angry all at once.

“What do you see in him?” he asks, his voice as transparent as the stories they have told of him, will continue to tell of him. Natasha closes her eyes and it’s Clint’s face she sees behind her lids, his voice that she grabs onto like a preserver.

_Don’t you fucking go anywhere I’m going to save you I swear to god I promise I am bringing you home don’t you fucking leave me._

“He kept me alive. And he saved me. I owe him my life.”

 

Four years later, she will stand on a bridge across from the same man who once wanted to kill her and the same man who has saved her a thousand times over.

_I’m not going to fight you. You’re my friend._

_You’re my mission._

(Natasha grabs Clint’s bow and pulls, pulls, pulls until it almost snaps, and battles until her fists are raw.)

 

**V. Nat**

She is thirty when she meets the Winter Soldier for the fourth time, she is thirty and has just lost her identity in a worse way than the Red Room has ever remade her and he is cold and restructured and he doesn’t recognize her at all, and she can tell.

She stares into Steve’s face and calls him out for his lie – it’s too much too soon, and there’s too much that stinks of bullshit that she no longer has the tolerance for or the strength to fight, and so she just _leaves_ , takes the long way home from the hospital and doesn’t bother with a cab or with the S.H.I.E.L.D. issued car that follows her for three blocks before that gives up on her, too. She finds herself wandering in and around streets that she feels like she should know but doesn’t, like a world that seems familiar and not familiar all at once, a strange alternate universe where time seems to stand still while she continues to move forward.

“Regimes fall every day,” she tells herself as she stares at her reflection in the window of a storefront, hollow eyes that are too dry and a voice that sounds like it’s been through hell, and somewhere in the back of her head, a voice asks her if she is scared.

I am not scared, she wants to say, but she can’t seem to remember why, because she is _not_ different, because she _does_ remember who she is. I am not scared, I am not, I am, I am –

 _I’m Russian. Or I was_.

 

“He’s a ghost story,” is what she tells Steve.

 _He’s my past,_ is what she doesn’t say.

 

She is thirty when she walks into the hospital room that is cold and dingy, curling up on the too-small bed beside his still body and whispering memories in his ear. (They have told her that it helps people to hear familiar voices if they are fighting between life and death, and as she puts her lips against his skin, she wishes that someone would have told her that so long ago.)

She is thirty when she sits on the couch in his run-down apartment, the smell of stale Chinese food and lingering gunpowder settling into her skin, her head pressed into his spine as her fingers find purchase around his waist, tracing the scars she was not there to help tend to.

She is thirty when she walks onto an airplane with half of her hair hidden under a tattered baseball cap, one hand sweaty on the handle of the overnight bag, her tired eyes working on overdrive as she searches for familiar sheared hair and black rimmed glasses among a sea of strangers who seem like they could be targets, or maybe weapons, or both.

She finds him near the tail section, three rows from the back of the plane, sitting inconspicuously in 35F with his head against the window, bags under his eyes and stubble under his chin; for a moment she thinks she’s dreaming all over again but he looks like him and moves like him and she realizes that’s all she needs to stop her heart from beating out of her chest.

She is Natalia, she is Olga, she is Aleksandra, the boarding pass clutched in her right hand lists her as Greta and she is visiting her overseas grandparents, brother in tow. She is a weapon, she is a pawn, she is a mistress and she is whomever she is told she needs to be, in order to survive.

“I’m glad you made it,” Clint says quietly as he helps her secure her bag underneath the seat before settling back into his own, curling their fingers together.

She is Natasha, she is Natasha in the field and Nat beneath the safety of the covers, she is Natasha when he’s mad and Nat when he’s kissing the parts of her body that she swore no one else would ever see. She is Natasha in the reports and Nat in the way he smiles, she is Natasha in conversations and Nat in the way he looks at her, when she comes apart inside of him while knowing that each time, she can be put back together.

“Me too,” she says and like an exorcism, she feels the last of the red seeping from her skin as he squeezes her palm.


End file.
